The cost of elections is increasing. Swing districts and voters are decreasing. Billions of dollars are being spent to target a smaller and smaller number of voters. The business community has an advantage in elections that no one else has. They are a trusted, credible communication source to these voters. As the cost per vote increases dramatically, employers are in a unique position to impact elections at very low cost.The 2014 elections are projected to be the most expensive midterms to date. Each election cycle, the cost of elections increases substantially. In 1998, candidates, parties and outside groups spent $1.6 billion total on Congressional races. By 2012, that figure more than doubled to $3.7 billion and is expected to rise again in 2014.

(Source: opensecrets.org)Counterintuitively, while election spending increases each cycle, there are fewer swing seats and competitive races taking place. According to the Cook Political Report Partisan Voter Index, there were 164 swing seats in the House in 1998. By 2013, that had dropped to 90. Even fewer, maybe 20-30, are actually competitive.

It isn't just the reduced number of competitive seats, there are fewer and fewer swing voters available to be persuaded in the competitive elections that DO exist. BIPAC uses a formula to determine the number of true swing voters in a given state or district. Over the last eight years, we take the lowest performance of ANY Republican and the lowest performance of ANY Democratic candidate and assign that low-water mark as a partisan baseline. We estimate the number of votes likely to be cast in 2014 and subtract the percentage that is base Republican and base Democratic and are left with the number of real swing votes in a state. You can see from the chart below that a very small number of votes are actually at play in the most competitive Senate races. In several states, the swing voters represent less than 20% of expected turnout. Only 13% of expected voters in NC are swing, 12% in GA, 18% in AK and 12% in CO. More money may be pouring into races, but there are increasingly fewer voters to persuade.

With approximately $4 billion to be spent in 2014 to impact elections, how can the business community play the most effective role in electing pro-business, pro-prosperity candidates? Educate your members and employees on the elections and how they will affect your company and their job. Employers are the most credible source for information, followed distantly by political parties and labor unions. Research has shown that employer-provided information was useful to helping voters make their voting decisions and it also made them more likely to vote. As the cost per vote skyrockets, employers, unique among those trying to impact elections, have a low cost alternative to traditional campaign tactics, such as TV advertising, with the additional benefit of being enormously more effective in shaping elections.